Grace Cross
Nutshell
First Floor Gallery - Harare
Nutshell
First Floor Gallery - Harare
Grace Cross | Bio
(b. Harare, Zimbabwe 1988)
Grace Cross graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and holds a Bachelor of Honors in English Literature from the University of Cape Town and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, for which she was awarded the Judy Steiner painting prize.
She has had five solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows both locally and internationally. She has works in the collections of Africa First, the Spier Arts Trust and the University of Cape Town among others. She is a grant recipient from the National Arts Council of South Africa and from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Cross is a material painter who reflects the psychic and physical weight that women carry with them; raising awareness about motherhood, home, and feminist historiographies. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent between continents; she was brought up in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, India and the USA. Her cultural transmission across national boundaries informs her painting practice today, where she excavates, and pays tribute to, feminist lineages of knowledge and knowledge production by interrogating histories, unearthing women’s stories and exposing their continued erasure.
Cross lives and works in Cape Town as a practicing mother and artist.
(b. Harare, Zimbabwe 1988)
Grace Cross graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and holds a Bachelor of Honors in English Literature from the University of Cape Town and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, for which she was awarded the Judy Steiner painting prize.
She has had five solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows both locally and internationally. She has works in the collections of Africa First, the Spier Arts Trust and the University of Cape Town among others. She is a grant recipient from the National Arts Council of South Africa and from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Cross is a material painter who reflects the psychic and physical weight that women carry with them; raising awareness about motherhood, home, and feminist historiographies. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent between continents; she was brought up in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, India and the USA. Her cultural transmission across national boundaries informs her painting practice today, where she excavates, and pays tribute to, feminist lineages of knowledge and knowledge production by interrogating histories, unearthing women’s stories and exposing their continued erasure.
Cross lives and works in Cape Town as a practicing mother and artist.
Nutshell | Artist Statement
Nutshell is a body of work made during the first year of my second child’s life, this new body of work continues my aim to make stories of motherhood, home, and domestic labour visible.
The show title compares the mother to a gnarled covering around a smooth kernel of a nut. The paintings delve into the interior devotional space of the womb (the most intimate of ordinary spaces). To truly understand the foetal and perinatal world you must reject the outside view of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake. By moving inward, and paying attention to the things on the inside, or the interpenetration of one thing by another, I want to elevate the unseen and small to being paramount.
A mother’s body is a bubble that contains another body, entirely self-made. The eloquence of this natural interpenetration is expounded upon in the exhibition where the painted figures turn away from the exterior, towards the immersive bubble of blood, amniotic fluid, touch, and feeling. My interest in connections of intimacy is evident through the painted cyclical systems, like globes turning, mouths opening, overflowing vessels, and hollow bodies that alternate between the roles of container and content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and outer walls.
The women I depict show their animal sexuality, their virulent fragility, their profane strength, and intimate body of community which motherhood has a hand in creating. Scenes from the everyday are depicted; the bend over woman stooping to collect the detritus of children, and the sticky hands of an infant cloying for attention. The symbols of jugs pouring, and breasts sprouting milk, like fertility totems, depict the pleasure and pain of breastfeeding. The ‘ordinary devotions’ of care are expanded upon. For me, the stories of mother and baby on the continuum of life, are about empathy, love, repetition, surrendering of the ego, and great adaptation.
The paintings pay homage to a long legacy of female weavers, textile makers and storytellers, as well as the labour of care. The embodied paintings have thickly painted warp and weft lines across them that link to a rich history of female mystic weavers and textile makers who quilt stories, and stitch spatial and epistemological borders together. Weaving the cultural fabric of life and ritual into my canvases; I am exploring the emotional wisdom that caring for children opens up.
The textured paintings, wrought in bright celebratory colour, tether together the sacred and the profane moments of motherhood. My work also seeks to honour mothers as links in an intergenerational web of unbroken physical continuity which trace a legacy of birth, desire, pain, love and surrender. Being a mother is being a vessel, constantly being filled up and poured out again. The depiction of motherhood and its homely intimacies is associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness - but for me the intimacies of women’s-work are the foundations on which our society is built.
Grace Cross
Nutshell is a body of work made during the first year of my second child’s life, this new body of work continues my aim to make stories of motherhood, home, and domestic labour visible.
The show title compares the mother to a gnarled covering around a smooth kernel of a nut. The paintings delve into the interior devotional space of the womb (the most intimate of ordinary spaces). To truly understand the foetal and perinatal world you must reject the outside view of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake. By moving inward, and paying attention to the things on the inside, or the interpenetration of one thing by another, I want to elevate the unseen and small to being paramount.
A mother’s body is a bubble that contains another body, entirely self-made. The eloquence of this natural interpenetration is expounded upon in the exhibition where the painted figures turn away from the exterior, towards the immersive bubble of blood, amniotic fluid, touch, and feeling. My interest in connections of intimacy is evident through the painted cyclical systems, like globes turning, mouths opening, overflowing vessels, and hollow bodies that alternate between the roles of container and content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and outer walls.
The women I depict show their animal sexuality, their virulent fragility, their profane strength, and intimate body of community which motherhood has a hand in creating. Scenes from the everyday are depicted; the bend over woman stooping to collect the detritus of children, and the sticky hands of an infant cloying for attention. The symbols of jugs pouring, and breasts sprouting milk, like fertility totems, depict the pleasure and pain of breastfeeding. The ‘ordinary devotions’ of care are expanded upon. For me, the stories of mother and baby on the continuum of life, are about empathy, love, repetition, surrendering of the ego, and great adaptation.
The paintings pay homage to a long legacy of female weavers, textile makers and storytellers, as well as the labour of care. The embodied paintings have thickly painted warp and weft lines across them that link to a rich history of female mystic weavers and textile makers who quilt stories, and stitch spatial and epistemological borders together. Weaving the cultural fabric of life and ritual into my canvases; I am exploring the emotional wisdom that caring for children opens up.
The textured paintings, wrought in bright celebratory colour, tether together the sacred and the profane moments of motherhood. My work also seeks to honour mothers as links in an intergenerational web of unbroken physical continuity which trace a legacy of birth, desire, pain, love and surrender. Being a mother is being a vessel, constantly being filled up and poured out again. The depiction of motherhood and its homely intimacies is associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness - but for me the intimacies of women’s-work are the foundations on which our society is built.
Grace Cross
Nutshell
Parenthood is a job with urgency of a vocation, painting is a vocation with urgency of a job. It is unequivocal that for women artists, straddling this seesaw is a greater challenge than for their male counterparts. It is a fact which transcends the biological imperatives. Conversely, a successful artistic practice requires earnest sincerity and authenticity derived from lived experience and so the evidence of the greater burden is manifest in the works of artist mothers, like Grace Cross in Nutshell. While we can remain at the superficial layer of literal, descriptive content of artworks, we can also read it in the ‘metadata’. Artist mothers often work from home, in constrained spaces, which means the space for making is limited. Equally limited is the time. Most of the works in Nutshell were painted at night after the children were asleep, by electric light, with interruptions. Works conceived more as discrete destinations and islands of free mind space rather than great swathes of landscape luxuriating in the decadence of available time for reflection and repose continuity in a set body of work. Inadvertently almost, these episodic works provide a unique insight into the diversity and the spectrum of possibilities that every artist is capable of and is continuously negotiating when choosing their next steps. In many cases, what the audience receives in an exhibition is a limited spectrum – a selected slice of all possibilities. In Nutshell we have the luxury and the privilege of entering a whole world of Grace Cross possibilities. Each painting is a doorway into a direction which can be taken and cannot be discounted. Nutshell is Grace Cross as story-teller of her own life and her own practice. Figuring out how to bring parts of our lives into a coherent whole is a process, a challenge and a conundrum that all of us face in life, more often than we would like to admit. We are only human, the best we can do is our best and knowing that is what takes us forward meaningfully and sanely. This body of work is both a reminder and a lesson in what that means.
Valerie Kabov
©2022
Parenthood is a job with urgency of a vocation, painting is a vocation with urgency of a job. It is unequivocal that for women artists, straddling this seesaw is a greater challenge than for their male counterparts. It is a fact which transcends the biological imperatives. Conversely, a successful artistic practice requires earnest sincerity and authenticity derived from lived experience and so the evidence of the greater burden is manifest in the works of artist mothers, like Grace Cross in Nutshell. While we can remain at the superficial layer of literal, descriptive content of artworks, we can also read it in the ‘metadata’. Artist mothers often work from home, in constrained spaces, which means the space for making is limited. Equally limited is the time. Most of the works in Nutshell were painted at night after the children were asleep, by electric light, with interruptions. Works conceived more as discrete destinations and islands of free mind space rather than great swathes of landscape luxuriating in the decadence of available time for reflection and repose continuity in a set body of work. Inadvertently almost, these episodic works provide a unique insight into the diversity and the spectrum of possibilities that every artist is capable of and is continuously negotiating when choosing their next steps. In many cases, what the audience receives in an exhibition is a limited spectrum – a selected slice of all possibilities. In Nutshell we have the luxury and the privilege of entering a whole world of Grace Cross possibilities. Each painting is a doorway into a direction which can be taken and cannot be discounted. Nutshell is Grace Cross as story-teller of her own life and her own practice. Figuring out how to bring parts of our lives into a coherent whole is a process, a challenge and a conundrum that all of us face in life, more often than we would like to admit. We are only human, the best we can do is our best and knowing that is what takes us forward meaningfully and sanely. This body of work is both a reminder and a lesson in what that means.
Valerie Kabov
©2022
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